Ryan Vance remembers Loch Erne

Before Loch Erne is itself,before Ireland even is,both are named Saimhermarking land’s first jealousy.

Partholon son of Seraand his free wife Dealgnaid,first settlers since the Flood,arrive already exiled.

He has with him his parentsstained deep in his hands,a murder unexplained –Ach, you know what parents are like.

His continental temper matchedby impulse all her own she took to bedTodhga, slave and lover, butdiscovered in his clutch she said

O Partholon, is it possiblefor a woman to be near honeyor a child next to new milkor a cat smell fresh meat

or a workman see sharp toolsor a hand feel warm glovesor a bee hover over gorseor a rock see a storm-tossed ship

Cried Partholon, Shut your bake!and struck the slave down dead –and despite a long tongue in herDealgnaid got to the point, so she did:

Or a man and woman be closein private without meddlingthe one with the other?I blame you for my longing.

Partholon grabbed her lap hound,slit the mutt throat to anus.No sooner had the blood spiltthan he cired Dealgnaid, forgive me!

So he named their Loch, their islandafter a dead dog, and in doingnamed the whole of Irelandnot knowing it went unnamed.

Their old gods overtook them,killed nine thousand in a plague.Saimher felt another risinghot and fluid from the core.

* * *

my sisters and I carry the land on our backsour green-gold dresses steeped to brown in the charmed mudsof Síodh Linn, Deirgeirt, Aillionn

but for us no druid’s resting field of flowersat night I hear it screaming for our bloodcursing our descendants and their stars; the giant nears

this is what happened: Méabh’s celebrationwoke a deep and mournful rumble from the landtoppling the ancient stones of Cruachan

from its cave, out came the giant, chalky mouth blood-cakedmountainous bulk unfolding like a mapwielding, one-handed, its mossy monolith

the last I saw of Méabh she stood defiantbetween the dancing cairns fists clenchedher knotted back turned to us as we fled

oh to be sure she is tough and wild and can hold her ownagainst countless men but what sort of personleaves their queen, their friend, to face such a thing alone?

still – we bolt, sobbing rivers across the fields, on to Loch Erne

* * *

His mum runs from one end of the boat to the other, chasing thunder, laughing the sort of laugh she reserves for funfair rides, when it feels like the seats might snap off the waltzer. He follows her gaze up, up, up. The helicopter overtakes the boat, a hole in the sky.

Sharing the clouds with only one other feature – a sacred tower rising from Devenish Island – it does not belong here. It ascends towards the tower to swing around in a perfect half-circle, a big dog testing the strength of its chain. Then begins the descent. It comes in fast and low, a dark faery casting rainbows in the spray.

Her laughter stops.

A cold shadow of air lifts his bedhead curls. He claps his hands over his ears, feels the thunder with his body.

“Well,” his mum huffs as they dock, “I didn’t find it funny.”

She marches up the dirt path, a pilgrimage to reclaim the monastery’s quiet history.

The distance to the next dock, the strength of the storm, how quickly the sun set, fuel in the tank: all underestimated. They are adrift.

Distant lights of mainland communities jump on the horizon. Flickering buoys mark safe sailing routes, clanking in the night like practical jokes. In little waterfalls the rain streams from the deck back to the loch. Below, the family shiver into their yellow life vests by gas lantern. His mum reads to his brother while his dad teaches him poker, spades and diamonds dealt across a bright red flare gun box.

* * *

There’s a photo of me in a captain’s hat, standing on Killadeas docks, but I can’t recall boarding the yacht. It’s embarassing – too young to know I’d carry that holiday for the rest of my life, I’ve lost that week spent pinballing around Loch Erne to sediment and erosion. Now experiences merely glint on the shores of childhood memory, gemstones amongst dark pebbles, and I’m an untrustworthy cartographer, shores less certain with each retelling.

* * *

In a thick dog-eared guide he learns of the two-sided statue of Boa Island Graveyard. A grey-green slab with weather-softened features, this mossy stump of rock was once a face and something else he’s too young to understand, something people put things inside, mementos and the like. He pictures himself circling the statue, each turn finding new features carved into the granite, alien, monstrous.

Without exception, every other graveyard he’s encountered has been boring, but on these islands he’s also seen a great many ruins with their thatched roofs long gone. They’re sad places, but not as sad as this graveyard, the only place of interest on Boa. He suspects it’s not even an island but a green sheet thrown over a floating mound of bones, which might at any moment rise from the waves in a dripping tangle of bare limbs.

Dark and noisy, round tables packed close on carpet sticky with old lager, air thick with cigarette smoke. Looking back, it’s not the sort of environment that should have appealed to his parents so soon after one gave up fags, the other booze, but something makes it worth the risk: a stage, guitar, fiddle and bodhrán. Music is, after all, how the Irish remember, just like everyone else.

They let him wander. How lost could he get in a five-room building on a three mile island? How could there be bad people when there were barely any people to begin with? Naive thinking, but not untrue: the barmaids, the doorman, the chef, all smile at the lost little boy, a temporary and makeshift community for one night only. The headline act adopts him and for two hours backstage they humour each other, but now all he can remember is being carried back to the boat, and the bright sound of her voice in the smoke as she devotes to him the first of her set.

The song itself is lost.

* * *

the night’s so dark we can barely see our feet nor the cliffsof Magho ahead and like crazed horses we drive ourselvesover the grassy edge, break apart on the way down

my piecemeal remains fly further than the restplunging into a body of water I turn effervescentgrief and fear bubbling out of me, broiling the surface

Oh, they wear him ragged,chase him to Erne’s mouth.He jumps into the world-seaand his flesh turns salmon pink.

In the brine he catches hazelnuts,nine in total, each one a muse,and sucking on their hard shellsfills to the brim with knowledge,the smartarse.

When tides at last recede, as sheets fallingfrom a lover’s body, as a sea eagleor perhaps a hawk, Fintan returnsto the island for one purpose:

Remind the Irish who they werebefore they were the Irish.

Ryan Vance is a writer and designer from Northern Ireland, now based in Glasgow. He is fiction editor of The Island Review and editor of The Queen's Head, an irregular print-only zine of speculative and genre fiction and non-fiction.